You have been stood up at the gates of Hell with nothing more than your faith and your trusty crowbar. Venture forth into the underworld, thou fear not for they have provided you with a slight outpost of goodness for all your demon slaying purposes. Ike_Brovlofski has delivered the goods in the form of a Hell-ish arena style frag fest. I recommend you start up your servers and invite about 3 or 4 buddies to help out crowbar some undead ass. You'll definately need as much help as you can get as the undead zombie hordes spill out from the mouth of Hell itself.

Architecture/Textures

The cracks running through the ground and the glowing red light emitting from them. The large arch with spikes, like teeth in the mouth of Hell spawning hundreds of demons. The cliff edges are wonderfully done, and so are the deep caverns and the lava (which could have been a better texture). It all adds up to a great little Hell-ish atmosphere. The massive FPS rape is a result of the zombie horde spawning. I went down to 17 fps, which is a pretty rare occassion for my computer. The max viewable distance needs to be increased, and the rear of the arena bit is a little bit bland, and longer than it needed to be. Chubby definately adds some points here. He's one cute little chumtoad.

Sound/Ambience

The sound replacement works well, however there could have been some ambient sounds. Screams, shouts, music, anything because the sound of crowbars hitting zombies and zombies screaming in reaction just gets a little annoying, especially when there's so many of them.

Gameplay/Teamwork

This map happens to be an arena based map and arena maps tend to get a little bit of a bad reputation because the players fight in the same area during the entire map, and the enemies seldom differ. The combination of stagnant surroundings and predictable enemies can be expressed by the equation boring + boring = boring². I feel the exact opposite. So long as the environment pulls you in and keeps your attention the matter of it being an arena map has no impact on the gameplay. The enemies come in waves, stronger and stronger with each wave. Zombies upon zombies in nearly endless streams all must die from the constant beatings with your crowbar. It gets a little repetitive. Then very reptitive, and then the Chubby God descends upon your noble squadron, a 357 Magnum. Swarms and swarms. Gunshots, screams and crowbars wildly flailing in the Hell-ish atmosphere. We progressed quickly through the map, it isn't very long and the boss is definately VERY disappointing. On the teamwork aspect of the map it's pretty basic. You spend most of the time hitting/shooting zombies in the face, running around them in circles avoiding their attacks while your teammates try to do the same. A team of 7 or 8 players can chomp through the map quite quickly.

Originality

Hellmouth is as original as they come, which isn't as original as we'd all hope.

Monster Usage/Item Placement

As previously mentioned the enemies come in waves and sometimes hordes. Ike used Arachnid_X's Hell Pack and it fits perfectly (I wonder why…). My favourite monster is the tentacles, they look and work amazingly. The items locations are pretty predictable, but the extra ammo at the back of the map helps during the enemy swarms.

Overall

Definately worth a couple rotations on the server. Good for LAN's and small games.